(no subject)

[gfish]

What do these headline all have in common?

• Wildfire murder charges filed


• U.S. officer describes disarray in Iraqi army


• General: Abuse scandal killed my career


• Seafood faces collapse, report says


• DEA: Gang of corrupt cops nabbed

They are all, according to CNN, less important than Cruise named studio top gun. We're only 5 days out from the most important and interesting midterm election of my lifetime*. Fuck you, CNN.

* This might be slight hyperbole. (Though I hope not.) Certainly the biggest since 1994.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

It's difficult to convince myself it's not purposeful, but then the question becomes: is that just what people want to see? and then we ask: have people been purposefully conditioned to want to prefer this?

[airlinepilot.livejournal.com]

Well, if you go to the US (http://www.cnn.com/US/) or World (http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/) pages, Tom Cruise is pleasantly absent. :)

[book-addict.livejournal.com]

Ooh, ooh. They all require a degree of actual thought to read and comprehend, and are likely to inspire further thinking. Thus marketed to a more select audience.

Yeah, I'm going to be watching the elections all night, and it's not even my country.

[tnarg42.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I'm not the only one rubbed the wrong way by that sort of stuff. The amount of entertainment "news", and just the general out-of-whackness of what constitutes a headline news story, has gotten totally out of hand.

On a related note, I've also noticed CNN is fond of giving glowing movie "reviews" for movies produced by TWX subsidiary studios (Warner Brothers, New Line, etc), but tends not to review other films. (Please feel free to prove me wrong on that.)

[tmfkan64.livejournal.com]

But, but, but... it's TOM CRUISE!! One of the biggest stars in the world! As for politics, isn't the next election in 2008? Maybe Arnold will run!

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Also, way to stay current by tying recent "news" into a 20-year-old movie, CNN.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

I stopped watching CNN back in late 1994/early 1995. If you recall, at that time the Russian army was attempting to squash Chechnya's secession movement, and right around new year's Russian tanks rolled into Grozny for house to house fighting. Aside from the brutality and horror of that, the situation was volatile and no one then knew if it might spark a wider war with international implications. Plus, Russia is a nuclear super-power, and there were concerns that the Chechens might have gotten their hands on some old Soviet nukes.

I was travelling that New Year, and watched CNN Headline News in an airport lounge. Quite properly, they lead off with a story about tanks in Grozny. For thirty seconds. They then spent four minutes covering the legal minutiae of the upcoming O.J. Simpson murder trial. Later, they spent a couple of minutes running down who the richest people in the US were. Since then, I have preferred news sources that don't consider the prospect of nuclear war boring.